Meal Planning

I hate to cook. Maybe "hate" is too strong of a word. Um...nope. Not in this instance. Some people love it. Some people like it. Me, I do it because I have to. And it's not that I am a "bad" cook. I haven't killed off my family. Yet. I just don't like to do it. Needless to say, my family eats out WAY too much.

Part our New Year's Resolution/Matt drinking the Dave Ramsey Kool-Aid has been to change our eating-out habits. It's actually went pretty well. Do I still hate to cook? Yeah, pretty much. But, I've found a few ways to make it a little more tolerable.

The first thing I did was get back into meal planning. I did the whole planning-for-two-weeks-at-a-time thing awhile back and for whatever reason stopped doing it. So when it came to cooking supper, I was flying by the seat of my pants on a daily basis. To help me in my meal planning, I made a Menu board . I browsed ideas on Pinterest and came up with this one:

I used the Command picture hangers to attatch it to the door of my pantry.

Right now I am only planning a week at a time. I know some people do two weeks, some even a whole month. I'm keeping it easy for me at the moment. It's working so far. I try to use my Crockpot at least once a week. Things like chilli, chicken and noodles, and certain casseroles can last us a couple of meals. If we have leftovers, say, from Tuesday night's meal, we will eat them on Wednesday night, and just float Wednesday's meal to Thursday. If I have a TON of leftovers, I freeze them. These are my go-to quick meals when 1) a recipe doesn't work out, 2) Something comes up, or 3) I just don't feel like doing an entire "new" meal. I haven't tried making an extra casserole and freezing it yet, but that's next on my list.

I have to say, it's going quite well. I've tried a few new recipes (thanks again Pinterest), and we've kept our eating out to just the weekends, and with Matt's new work schedule, we're only eating out maybe once on the weekends. It just depends. And in all honest, with Matt's schedule, it is easier to eat at home: with his odd sleeping schedule and Logan now in school, it makes evening adventures out stressful.